What Next | Daily News and Analysis13 Feb 2019

Jeff Bezos’s Privacy Complexifier

On today’s show, hosts April Glaser and Will Oremus talk about the implications from last week’s bizarre, but also serious, showdown between Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and American Media INC, the owner of the Trump-friendly National Enquirer. Bezos claimed the Enquirer was blackmailing him by threatening to release private and quite racy photos between him and the woman he was having an affair with. Bezos stood up to the alleged extortion by publishing his account of the situation, complete with threatening emails from AMI.

At the same time Bezos was fighting for his own privacy, his company was making a deal that could have serious privacy implications for the rest of us. This week, Amazon announced it was acquiring Eero, the mesh WiFi router startup. To sort through this mesh, the hosts are joined by Stacey Higginbotham, who writes all about the internet of things. They ask her about what this move means for smart home users’ privacy, and where we should draw the line on what in our home should be smart, and what should be...well, dumb.

8:08 - Interview with Stacey Higginbotham

21:15 - Don’t Close My Tabs

Don’t Close My Tabs:

April: The Baffler: The Whitest News You Know

Will: The New Republic: The False Promise of Silicon Valley’s Quest to Save the World

Podcast production by Max Jacobs

You can get updates about what’s coming up next by following us on Twitter @ifthenpod. You can follow Will @WillOremus and April @Aprilaser. If you have a question or comment, you can email us at ifthen@slate.com.

If Then is presented by Slate and Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Listen to If Then via Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(2478)

Trump's Forever War

The US can’t leave Iran in charge of the Strait of Hormuz, but it can’t wrestle control away without committing ground troops—but it also can’t keep going on like this. So where does that leave everyo...

29 Jul 27min

The DSA's Biggest Hater Likes One of Their Policies

In the wake of the success among members of the Democratic Socialists of America, The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait has turned in a series of articles that call the group anti-democratic, against the Demo...

28 Jul 26min

How Charlie Kirk Went From Martyr to Meme

In the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, the NFL was holding moments of silence, Ezra Klein was waxing about how he was ‘practicing politics the right way,” and criticizing Kirk online cou...

27 Jul 28min

Off-the-Record: Wait, You Ran THAT Boston Marathon?

Why are kids getting faster? Is it the shoes? Also, running the Boston Marathon is obviously a huge accomplishment, but if you ran the 2013 Boston Marathon, you should lead with that and not save it f...

24 Jul 6min

Trump’s Only Friend

Steve Witkoff is a real estate investor, an attorney, and now America’s Special Envoy to the Middle East. It may seem like a weird career shift for Witkoff, but he’s such an outlier that the famously ...

24 Jul 24min

Will Andrew Tate Finally Be Held Accountable?

Over the weekend, Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested in Florida after British prosecutors brought new charges of rape and sex-trafficking, which were added to charges from May 2025 and an on-going ...

23 Jul 30min

The Best DOJ Money Can Buy

A federal judge paused the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. This may not have been a necessary step if the Department of Justice had taken its corporate enforcement mandate more serious...

22 Jul 25min

Trump’s White Whale

When Donald Trump seizes on an idea, he can riff on it nigh infinitely in any direction, which is why his fairly short and contained primetime speech on election security last week seemed so out of ch...

21 Jul 30min